Having sufferd so intensely, Italy's post-war comeback into prosperity was deemed the economic miracle of the 1950s, characterized by rapid increases in wages across the general population, as well as the reconstruction of destroyed cities. Aside from their deep interest in the post-fascist government’s tactical approach to economic revival, historians cannot ignore the simultaneous or, arguably consequential, radicalism experienced by the country’s popular culture. In observing these cultural changes, academics can look to the role film played in both reflecting and constructing the ideals, aspirations, and fears of Italian society. With wages held down tightly until the mid-1950s, Italians had little disposable income for consumer goods, making visits to the cinema a cheap way of accessing consumption [Wood 165]. Since before the second World War had even begun, the establishment of cinema as a popular past time had been something worth taking advantage of, with the intent of providing the masses with a constructed ideal, a stratagem adopted by Benito Mussolini in his foundation of Cinecittá, as well as the American government in its distribution of films in Italy.      
   
    That said, historians and film academics such as Mary Wood and Stephen Gundle have utilized film’s presence in 20th century Italy as a way of exploring the fluctuations of gender politics and beauty standards. Based on these works, we’re provided with much insight into the reasoning behind various castings and success stories of Italian movie stars in post-neorealist film and the surging comedia d’Italiana. As the 'battle of the sexes' has many complex functions in Italian cinema [Wood], studying the changing roles and physiques assuming the mainstream at the time reveal much about the movement of Italy’s progression into the modern world after the war, outlining the population’s desires to identify with international influences, particularly the newfound socioeconomic mobility of women and the resistance of the Catholic-driven conservatism against it. Although the recognition of Italian super stars such as Sophia Loren still exists today, as well as an understanding of their comeuppance into the spotlight as an embodiment of female modernity, the displacement of such actresses by newer, younger faces in the 60s and 70s is a topic not touched on nearly as much. Naturally, this can be accounted to the completion of Italy’s settlement into the modern world, but the abandonment of interests in actresses who assumed stardom during the prime of Loren and Ehkberg ignores a different development occurring in Italian culture and cinema, that is, Italy’s joining of Britain and France into the radically charged Swinging Sixties and Seventies. Although the more classic faces of Italian cinema would soon be displaced by young actresses like Ornella Muti who took on roles in a liberal Italy’s risqué erotic dramas and teen films, the audiences of the late 60s enjoyed the resurgence of slightly older actresses, such as Monica Vitti, who fulfilled the need for Italy to be introduced to Britain’s Bond-like femme fatale films and more.

     Before diving into the significance of the 50s modern depictions of female’s growing sexuality and independence, it is beneficial to understand the establishment of controversial gender politics in Italian cinema’s earliest stages. Wood touches on the silent era of Italian film, focusing on the presence of hyper-femininity and the role of le dive as indicators of the growing tensions toward female autonomy. Using Cabiria and Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei as examples, she notes how although lead actresses were marketed and dressed to accentuate their femininity and foreground their sexual nature and the films’ narratives portrayed a contrast to the restraint of the Roman girl, the collections of mis en scenes, restricted screen space and even claustrophobic set designs were tailored to represent the subjugation and containment of women, as emphasized by the leads’ hypersexuality.      

    As the World War began and Italy experienced many drastic social/cultural changes, the ideals of femininity so changed with them, altered by widespread exposure to images, through cinema, propaganda, and the mixture of the two. Much credit is given to the United States in manipulating the ideal image of Italy due to their many efforts to oppose Mussolini’s fascist propagandist and telefoni bianci films, which encouraged the notion of prosperity derived from his dictatorship. Stephen Gundle, in Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy, notes how “the Americans had a clear idea of the role of cinema in the re-education of Italians”. “No fewer than 800 films were imported by the end of 1948”, providing "that Hollywood cinema was an integral part of the experience of the transition from war to peace and recovery for many Italians.”      

    American film distributors, no longer tasked solely with denouncing the fascist regime, could release films depicting American luxury and consumerism, as well as portray their versions of heroic male protagonists and the beautiful women that desired them. In providing examples of the stars of Hollywood before the peak of actresses like Marilyn Monroe, Gundle emphasizes the appeal of women like Rita Hayworth to the Italian audience. Hayworth, the era’s “leading lady of Hary Cohn’s Columbia Pictures… was the ultimate constructed star, who presented an unusual mixture of hyperbolic, manufactured beauty, perfect fashioning, healthy physicality, vampish behavior and innocence of spirit”.  This exposure to Hollywood’s ability to construct beauty was Italy’s first taste of female portrayals which opposed the natural, unaltered physicality of le dive in earlier cinema. Films and television stars influenced models of appearance and beauty and contributed to greater attention to and care of self, practices which are commonly seen as precursors of a fully developed consumer culture.     

    During this transition to a new beauty, there remained many concerns over the displacement of Italian traditions by the made-up, brazen American idea. Still, make-up, swimsuits, jazz records and other material comforts were pieces of modern prosperity that young Italian’s yearned for. Consequentially, regardless of the efforts made to promote the alternative Italian beauty, “Hollywood was the great beauty ideal”, as “stars were associated in the public mind with wealth, leisure, youth, beauty, travel, health and excitement.”  Soon enough, “cosmetics and cinema-related ideals of beauty began to spread to all urban classes” of the time, opening young minds to the possibilities of modern levels of consumption and consumerism.     

    Wood explains this "desire to forget wartime hardship” in conjunction “with the materialism of American culture” as the guidelines responsible for the casting of actresses like Sophia Loren and Marisa Allasio. She continues, “The narratives developed for these spirited, younger women stress their youth and innocence, and their physical attributes. Known as the maggiorate fisiche (the physically well endowed), they literally embody prosperity.”  By using these actresses to represent the new, more prosperous body of Italy, directors and producers were able to provide, alongside the entertainment value of 1950s’ comedies’, social commentary, particularly those concerning the tensions surrounding the new socioeconomic mobility of women in Italy. In studying this, Wood uses Risi’s Poveri, ma belli and Belle, ma povere, films in which "desires for material comfort are represented by record shops, clothes, leisure activities, and even continuing education classes”. These details are juxtaposed with the ambitious shape of Giovanna (played by Marisa Allasio), who, in turn, embodies the country’s unease with the upward mobility of women. In the story’s narrative, Giovanna, being more beautiful and more endowed than the sisters of the male characters, "represents the level of effort, of material wealth, necessary to win her."

     Both Mary Wood and Marcia Landy recognize Sophia Loren as critical to this early stage of comedia all’Italiana, taking note of how “the postwar comedies focused on the tribulations of courtship and marriage… and challenges to sanctioned forms of sexuality. [Landy 139]” In La Bella Mugnaia, Loren’s character, Carmela (Loren), the wife of a miller, represents what is at stake for women, as she uses her looks and sex appeal to avoid paying oppressive taxes. Later in the movie, a riot is started over the swinging of Loren’s bare legs at a local festival (which results in her husband’s arrest). Here, a tension arises between Carmela’s centrality as male desire or an object under male control and her provocative performance as her own independent subjectivity. Speaking on De Sica’s “rosy neorealist” postwar comedy “Pane, amore, e…” series, Landy notes that “central to the success of these romantic comedies was their focus on the rural milieu and on the sensuous bodies, outspoken language, and raucous antics of the female stars”. Here, Loren’s role as a rural fish merchant sets the stage for building tension between the traditional picture of women’s role in smaller Italian society and their desire for social mobility in a growing economy, again, emphasizing the role of sexuality as a means of liberation and, in turn, what is at stake for women.     

    This setting is taken a step further years later in Ieri, Oggi, Domani (1963), De Sica’s use of broken up narratives to reflect on the past and take a glimpse into the future. In this film, De Sica first takes a look at a small town, perhaps a slightly modernized rural of Naples, in which a family’s sole source of income, a mother’s selling boxes of cigarettes roadside, is threatened by the sentencing of her to jail for outstanding obligations. In order to evade prison time, Adelina, the mother, ropes a tired Mastroianni into impregnating her constantly, as a pregnant woman cannot be sent to jail. In the community she is praised for her evasion, but she is eventually caught, only to be pardoned weeks later, a celebrated moment led by precession held by the entire community. In De Sica’s second story, the “Oggi", Loren plays Anna, the wife of a wealthy businessman enjoying a rendezvous with her lover, Renzo, a low-income, sullen writer, portrayed again by Mastroianni. When she tells him to take the wheel of her husband’s large and lavish Rolls-Royce, Renzo is forced to swerve in order to avoid hitting a boy in the middle of the road and severely damages the front of the car. She belittles Renzo, remarking that it serves her right letting the driver of a Fiat 500 try to control a Rolls-Royce, then leaves him on the roadside after hitching a ride from a male driver with a sexual interest and faster car. In the final tale, the Domani, De Sica predicts the sex-driven atmosphere of the late 60s, where Loren plays a call-girl, Mara, who makes a hefty income from clients like the jumpy, neurotic, and love-stricken Augusto (Mastroianni). Conflict arises when a young man studying to become a priest nearly throws away all of his vows for the sake of dating Mara. Here, like in La Bella Mugnaia, Loren and Mastroianni are paired to convey the progressing dominance of Italian women, wherein Loren’s fruitful, well-endowed body quite literally represents a woman’s means of prosperity, and furthermore, the feminization of the male counterpart through the featuring of Mastroianni as a rejected, disconsolate lover (Landy 156).
   
    De Sica’s premonitions concerning the sexual liberation that would define the decade ahead were similarly displayed by other neorealist directors. A prime example is Boccaccio ’70 (Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Monicelli), a series of short stories each displaying the battle of the sexes, including a priest's struggle against the seductive temptation of a billboard-sized Anita Ekhberg, as well as another display of Sophia Loren as the prime desire of the male population, a condition which she uses to her advantage but struggles to weigh the true costs of. Clearly, criticisms of the path in which Italy was moving in conjunction with a modernizing world fulfilled the interests of Italian audiences, but tensions directly related to growing sexuality throughout the general populous seemed to dominate the silver screen. Taking on a different viewpoint of Italy’s transitional period was Michelangelo Antonioni and his alternatively styled representations of modern lovers in 60s Italy. In three of his four most renowned films, the “Antoinionian tetralogy” (L’avventura, La Notte, L’esclisse, and Il Deserto Rosso), Antonioni turns to his rumored lover and confirmed muse, Monica Vitti, to showcase the complications of living and loving in modern society. Unlike the blatant expression of Italy’s battle of the sexes through the sensuous movements of Sophia Loren, Antonioni’s exhibition of these concerns relies on “[female] protagonists, not because feminine psychology says that love is their proper domain but because Western civilization, Antonioni thinks, has left [women] alone a modicum of the capacity to acknowledge feelings, a capacity virtually lost by men, especially intellectual men” [Chatman 56]. Landy importantly notes that though [Vitti’s] performances in Antonioni’s films and her relationship with the director have been duly examined, much less has been written about her work as a comic actress [landy 159].    

    While this is true, the case remains that in exploring Antonioni’s tetralogy, it is more commonly examined from a viewpoint concerned with Antonioni’s cinematic/thematic style or his romantic (and personal) relationship with Monica Vitti, rather than examining the works as a critical analysis surrounding gender politics. Whereas her comedy roles are connected to the seductresses, manipulators, and adventure figures of James Bond films, eschewing traditional images of maternity, conjugality and courtship [Landy 159], her darker-toned, almost surrealist work offers insight into the psychological shifts of the modern woman, altogether encompassing the progression of a young lover (in L’avventuraand L'eclisse) into full-fledged adulthood (Il Deserto Rosso) against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving Italy.      
 
    In L’avventura, a young woman, Claudia (played by Vitti) joins her friend, Anna, and Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro, on a small cruise amongst some scattered islands. While on the island, Anna goes missing without a trace, and eventually, the group virtually gives up on finding her. Soon enough, Anna’s boyfriend begins confessing love to Claudia, though the two have not had much contact. Eventually, Claudia submits to Sandro’s love, but is later cheated on by him at a hotel. The films ends with the two crying, staring off into the horizon on a rooftop during the sunrise. This tale brings up many questions of Antonioni’s intentions as far as discerning morality and condemning sex and adultery.

     Many directors of the time would most likely admit to having had implemented their own moral positioning in their films, but Antonioni's criticisms of faults found within adult love differ in that they abandon what he refers to as "obsolete moral standards, out-of-date myths, old conventions." [C&W 18] Instead Antonioni chooses to construct works in which there are no heroes, only protagonists, which we are not expected to identify with...or to judge them as individuals,instead left free to draw more general conclusions. [C&W 18] For example, we are expected to see Sandro as a representative of his class, society, and time, allowing Antonioni's critique of the human condition to penetrate through to the audience in a stronger light. In this film, and perhaps in Sandro's case of repressing his failures in creative architecture, in particular, Antonioni comments on a general condition within Italy, that "the world is sexually awry because men have found in a compulsive eroticism some diversion from their problems [C&W 20]. This need for diversion connects closely with the component of characters' lives in Antonioni films that is boredom. In L'avventura, we see by the way everyone around Claudia acts on the boat and the island, the way they constantly search for something, anything (like Raimondo feeding into the trend of snorkeling even though he hates it or Patrizia needing her jigsaw puzzles) to do. Claudia, on the other hand, is always fully satisfied, engaged or even excited about whatever is happening, though she also appears to be isolated from the rest of the group in that sense, which we can then attribute to her lower class upbringing in comparison with a group of adults dissatisfied by everything their money can buy. By the melancholic ending of the film, where Claudia is betrayed by Sandro and experiences the emotional turmoil that is commonplace for the other characters, she realizes she has become somewhat like Sandro and the others, but as an audience, we believe she will be able to recover due to her inherently having more personality.     

    As L'avventura ends with the sunrise, L'eclisse opens with a couple in an apartment in early morning. The couple, Vittoria (Vitti) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), is breaking up. In this movie, and scene in particular, Antonioni puts a stronger emphasis on money and modernization in general, as denoted by the apartment's array of small technologies and modern art, as well as the giant machinery being constructed outside the apartment.  This idea is pushed further with the introduction of Vittoria's main love interest throughout the film, Piero, a stockbroker. Still, this movie conveys a critique of the role eroticism plays in the modern world and lays out a situation in which Vitti's character is the only character in which we find a healthy approach to it. Chatman explains how "for Piero, eroticism is simply another outlet for the power drive" aside from the stock market and sports cars, where "in contrast, Riccardo needs a woman for security as a haven between long and neurotic voyages into himself." This observation is similar to that made by Cameron & Wood, in which we take into account Antonioni's feelings toward Western civilization's compulsive eroticism.     

    As the movie ends, we are expecting Piero to show up and meet Claudia for their date, but instead we see Claudia by herself, followed by a fragmented sequence of things in the city: rustling trees, vehicles moving, a random man passing by in the street. This ending, as supported by Chatman, implies Vittoria's ability to see the world with clarity due to her acceptance in herself, whatever it is that a man excites, but also a downplaying of sex, where Vittoria abandons the conventionally overbearing rules and gravity surrounding sexuality which suggest that sex is a “begin-all, end-all” situation. In this observation, Vitti's movments through L'avventura and L'eclisse showcase a young woman's social movements during a period defined, or in a sense, plagued, by rapid modernization and economic buildup. In each, she plays a protagonist who, though she sometimes struggles to communicate or even define her own feelings, expresses a relatively healthy sexuality free from the pressures of conventional restrictions, but also apart from the compulsive escapism behind modern eroticism.      

    It's in Il Desert Rosso (1964) that Vitti's characters' developed clarity and the pressures of the world have led to a neuroticism shared by both our protagonist and the minor characters, as she has been approaching this state since the ending of L'avventura. Here, Antonioni’s outline of a young women’s progression into the sixties delivers Monica Vitti into adulthood and showcases the fully grown, modern wife’s tensions concerning the new age of Italy (metaphorically displayed as a neurotic insanity resulting from an unnamed accident), but more importantly, sets the stage for a modern woman ready to acclimate to a new age. Of course, this film as a culmination of neurotic and detached tendencies means Guiliana (Vitti) will have an even harder time communicating her feelings than the previous two protagonists we dealt with. Instead, these various emotions are expressed through Antonioni's use of color and the pressures of the world around her is expressed as the imposing industrialism. By using these two elements, the film shows with almost clinical precision how to the deeply neurotic mind everything in life is leveled to the problem [Chatman 84], including love, work, friendships, and familial responsibility. Giuliana's neuroticism in this story makes her not only as bad as the other characters, but almost a parody, in which the minor characters, the normal ones, represent those who are simply more adjusted to the times. In reality, it is Giuliana in whom all the film's true positive values are embodied, and in this respect she is consistent with Monica Vitti characters throughout the tetralogy [C&W 116].  

     At the end of the film, a scene in which Giuliana wears the same 'natural' green coat she did in the beginning, assumedly representing her naturalness or normality in comparison to the bleak, industrial backdrop, she explains to her son that the birds do not get killed flying through the poisonous yellow smoke that paints the sky because they've learned to avoid it. Analyses from Chatman, Cameron and Wood explain this as a statement insisting that Giuliana, our modern woman, has reached total defeat: she will henceforth try to get along, not by coming to terms with her abnormal condition or with her environment, but simply  by blocking them out [C&W 119]. But still, the problem lies in that avoiding the poisonous smoke in her life, the effects of industrialism and the neurotic behavior of the society which Antonioni aims to critique, she is assuming a "spiritual paralysis" in which she cannot connect with anyone. If she instead chooses to accept it, she is choosing death.      

    Still, it seems that the themes Antonioni touches on are quite similar to those being played on in mainstream Italian comedy at the time, that is, a rapidly evolving sense of consumerism and the everlasting battle of the sexes for power. The difference lies in that while typical comedies exploit the generally growing sense of sensualism to showcase the tensions of female rise to power, Monica Vitti's characters have assumed a role as the positive symbol of personality and sexuality, at first, untainted by the consumeristic tendencies of the industrializing world around her, in order to foil and, in turn, showcase the neuroticism behind the general population's treatment of sexuality.     

    Furthermore, the era's mainstream comedies typically feature the female leads, regardless of the idea in which they are gaining power and moving forward socially or economically, as relatively restricted by their sex, that is, both their gender and the sex appeal they hold over men. In these movies, it seems that the female lead, though celebrated as a star or living her best happy-ever-after, involves dependence on her male counterpart, whether that means finding the perfect husband (like in Pane, amore e...) or even being self-sufficient but solely through means of sex, like in Ieri, Oggi, Domani. Vitti's Giuliana, instead, works almost as a criticism of the entrapment she feels being forced to adjust to a society like her own, not criticizing, necessarily, the institution of marriage or the traditional family (though many critics recognize Antonioni's many jabs at the fragility of said institution), but the forced normality of it all.     

    Vitti's career moves following her work with Antonioni almost reflect her characters' experiences in trying to adjust in that she seems to abandon the path of normality because she has already seen what detriment it can bring. Instead, throughout the late 60s and early 70s, Vitti rejected the maternal roles being offered to her and joined the wave of the Swinging Sixties being experienced by the French and British. In these films, such as La cintura di castita (1967), La damma scarlatte (1968) and Polvere di stelle (1973), the camera emphasizes her chiseled features and enigma, whereas in her pictures with Antonioni, her acting and physical appearance are restrained and indecipherable [Landy 159].Vitti's later roles, aside from emphasizing her long lashes, full lips, and swinging body, although comedies and parodies of societal institutions or film styles, contain progressive themes that mark the movement of Italy into the future. Mary Wood in her chapter introduction on gender politics in Italian film throughout the 20th century notes that for quite some time, Italian film did not even touch the idea of a femme fatale like Britain and France did, but in films like the renowned La Ragazza con una Pistola (1968), Vitti's character... moves her farther and farther away from traditional conceptions of southern Italian femininity. [Landy 160]     

    Vitti’s other lead roles in Brit-powered films, such as Modesty Blaise, in which she plays an slick, stylish and seductive international super spy and her rejection of typical maternal roles chosen for older actresses helps to identify Italy’s long-awaited adjustment to a post-war Europe, just as they exemplify Antonioni’s female protagonists’ adaptation to it as well. In choosing the castings that she did, then, Monica Vitti, over the course of more than a decade, successfully downplays Mary Wood’s description of Italian cinema as obsessed with the concerns of men and marginalizing the female [Wood 181], and instead supports the claim by Paolo Pilliteri "that women have been the true centres of Italian comedy since the 1950s.” While Wood’s description may very well be accurate, Vitti’s roles support a movement away from it, and therefore assume the function of moving away from it, both in her films with Antonioni and her successive ones.